Hi there! It looks like you were inspired by my friend Qu’s work for the Heat 1995 fandom in creating this Lawrence of Arabia piece. It was posted back in February:
While I know my friend’s blog has since been deactivated, it would be a decent gesture to credit them somewhere in your post.
Please don't let us die alone here. Donate, share, like anything.
The martyrs have become 1000 martyrs. Every minute we die here. Please interact.
Here we are, fleeing death, me, my husband and my children, in the last days of the attacks launched by the occupation forces on our areas.
Please help us and donate and do not leave us alone to die
#Free Palestine #We are now in a group ghada#Save us from death#Don't leave us alone#Please help us#Israel seeks annihilation#Please donate now#Save us from death#Trump #Israel#Free Palestine
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Hi my name is Mickey and I'm raising funds for:
Suheila, who is … Mickey Dokter needs your support for Support Suhaila's family in
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My name is Suheila from Gaza 🇵🇸,
a mother of 5 children, living with my family in a tent after the war destroyed our home and everything we
Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."
I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.
So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.
Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.
This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.
Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.
And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.
Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.
Steps to Disable or Uninstall 'Recall' in Windows 11 24H2
there are multiple options here depending on how comfortable you are digging into your computer's registry. You can either simply disable it surface level through settings or excise it entirely from the system registry
reblogging again as a cautionary tale to please PLEASE fucking make a system restore point before you do anything. i consider myself tech savvy and still nearly bricked my computer. and make sure you know how to access safe mode
My late father was the one who taught me to be cynical about advertising, for all that putting up ads was literally his whole job. He taught me from a very young age that advertising is expensive, and they tack that cost onto the price. That if something is heavily advertised, you can count on the fact that there's an identical product out there, usually even manufactured in the same factory, that's cheaper because they don't spend all that money on advertising.
A German friend walked me through Lidl, turning over items to show the factories where the items were manufactured and what expensive brands they correspond to, we did taste tests on some of the more pricey food things later and they were the same product. learning about food manufacturing was a hobby for her.
European glasses and sunglasses are made in the same Italian factories that make the luxury ones, they have the same quality control and warranty. You are paying €100 for a logo.
Some things cost more because they are actually made with better quality materials and where the workers are properly compensated, others are the same product as the off brand version with the brand name markup. It takes a lifetime to learn the intricacies which is why consumer advocacy associations and legal protection by (truly) independent agencies is crucial.
how people (re: radfems) continue to act like somehow the nature of the sex activities themselves are what make a sexual encounter violent baffles the mind. the idea that neil gaiman was allowed to rape so many women for so long because "liberals pressure women into being kinky for #Feminism" and not that he was rich and powerful and was taking advantage of very specifically poor women who were relying on him for housing, food, etc disgusts me in a way i cannot articulate. how is this relevant? how did "sex positivity" allow gaiman to do the same thing many many many men before him have done (leverage their higher social and economic class to coerce and silence victims)?
this is a disgusting attempt to drag very real victims experiencing the very real consequences of a world when men have the social and economic standing to control women and their bodies in the ways they please into the typical garbage radfem bullshit about how BDSM is evil and scary and bad and #normalizes violence. heres the thing you dipshit, sexual violence against women has been normalized for centuries and it certainly was not under the guise of Kink or Freedom of Speech! and had gaiman not had access to this language, he still would have sexually abused women because he was a rich man in a position of power to do so. that's it! it's a very simple material reality! no amount of "sex negativity" will do fucking anything to prevent sexual violence. god.
i must again stress no matter what they say or what kind of language they couch it in, radfems are fundamentally immaterial. the idea that this is what needs to be done to end patriarchy, the idea that "normal" sex is okay (and not sexually violent!), the idea that kink is how and why sexual violence is "culturally sanctioned" - fundamentally out of touch with reality! with the fact that sexual violence ultimately happens because people are given the power to do so! it has nothing to do with whips and chains and spanking!
I think it is notable that at least one woman Gaiman assaulted, Caroline, was not apparently involved in anything BDSM, nor did Gaiman— at least, according to Caroline as presented in the expose— try to coerce Caroline or cover up his abuse of her by talking about BDSM dynamics. Instead, he committed your bog-standard vanilla sexual abuses— groping her without permission, and pressuring her into frequent phone sex with the heavy implication he’d deprive her of her housing if she declined his advances. (An implication he later made good on.)
Now, was this Obviously Less Bad than the “call me Master/lick up my waste” stuff or the violent penetrative rape he pulled on other women? Was this a more acceptable form of sexual abuse and assault and coercion— not a real part of the pattern— because it was “vanilla?” I think if you argue that it was, you’re being pretty disgusting, and you have a lot more in common with patriarchal conservatives than you might want to admit.
Instead, I think what Caroline’s story makes clear is that this is about a guy using his wealth and fame to exploit others, make them jump to his whistle, and make them unable to leave his abuses because he’s providing them with resources they need and wouldn’t get elsewhere. And it’s also about a guy who feels entitled to women’s bodies, genuinely doesn’t consider their comfort or consent important, thinks he’s a real and complex person with real needs in a way that women— or at least some women, women he considers “beneath him”— aren’t. Which is a tale as old as wealth and hierarchical power structures. And also a tale that plays out every day with rapists and abusers who, if you asked, would truthfully tell you they are totally grossed out by BDSM, have no interest in it, and feel the only real or acceptable form of sex is PIV in the missionary position between a cis man and a cis woman.
The stuff that sticks with you about the “BDSM” part of the story should be that Gaiman seemingly never negotiated anything, never asked for consent (except maybe after the fact, when, dude, that doesn’t count), had no problem wheedling, pressuring, and threatening when given a clear rejection…just like in the non-“BDSM” part of the story.
However, he crucially— and accurately, I think— understood that saying “BDSM” can muddy the water with people who don’t know very much about it. People will assume that if a victim was ostensibly“into BDSM” or ostensibly agreed to enter a d/s relationship, it means that they were “asking for” non-consensual violence, non-consensual unsafe sex, and general abuse. People will assume that if a rapist was “into BDSM,” either something about BDSM made them confused about the concept of consent so they truly did not understand that it’s not okay to brutalize someone without their very enthusiastic permission and a lot of negotiating beforehand— or something about BDSM made their libido and violent urges “uncontrollable,” so they just couldn’t prevent themselves from raping. Ultimately, this attitude— the “morally necessary”kink shaming of the quoted post— blames victims, exonerates rapists, and makes it seem like the biggest rape threats are (frankly, far more often queer than hetero) freaky guys who openly like leather and whips and piss instead of rich celebrity men, suburban husbands/dads, priests, teachers…
A Tumblr post by @roycohn – which I'll link here for good measure – has been making the rounds lately; it speaks of David Lynch's "fundamental" understanding of "how abusive and exploitative the world is to those with the least power". Inspired by this exact post, in preparation for this piece – actually, it was the first impetus to actually get off my ass and try to confront the loss – I rewatched two specific scenes of Twin Peaks: The Return. One occurs during episode 6 and the other during episode 15, and some of you may already know which scenes I'm referring to without me having to spoil them for the people who haven't seen Season 3. I didn't really know how to articulate the way I felt after these scenes, and I still don't. I'm looking at his (mostly) blank page and all of a sudden @postlover sends a tribute video somebody made on TikTok. I was talking to another friend, and we both registered just how something profound seems to have shifted over these last few days. Something wicked this way comes.
Sure, the world's wild at heart and weird on top, and that's the beauty of it, right? There is profound tenderness to be found even in the face of bottomless horror. A darkness and a light coexist at the heart of it all, and they balance each other out. They make the world what it is and they make everything strange and marvelous and ours, in a way – ours to explore, to come to terms with, to make sense of. On the other hand there doesn't seem to be much light left as we speak. My country delves further and further into a formless mass of updated postfascist sludge; Palestine is still at the mercy of a military force, Israel's, that is notoriously bad at giving a shit about truces and human rights; I won't even begin to mention whatever the fuck is going on in the United States. These two things seem untied to David Lynch as is, and yet I'd argue that the connections are there. There was another Tumblr post floating around ages ago where among other things people called Hideo Kojima, Werner Herzog and David Lynch "the last three immortals" or something along the lines of that. It's hard to believe that we are now entering a time when even immortals die. At the cost of sounding fatalistic, the death of David Lynch comes at an unfortunate time for the world, and yet it comes at the only possible time for it to ever happen.
We are probably at our saddest. Music-making's considered a hassle, if not just a failing business (so much so that Spotify head honchos feels the need to contract with AI companies who give military drones their brains); everybody hates everybody else, arbitrary lines are being drawn all around and people are getting beaten, maimed, killed over them. There is no empathy left. Gordon Cole – not the Sunset Blvd. one, I assure you – told his colleagues to "fix their hearts or die". And now that Gordon Cole isn't here, who will remind them? It doesn't seem like anyone's particularly aching for a new way to perceive and shape the world. The future seems horribly bleak, and what's worse is there doesn't seem to be a point in finding a new one. Mark Fisher was, once again, probably right: the vision of a different future – and action upon it – was the key to something else, something less shitty at the very least. It feels like people succeeded in taking that vision away.
But the Lynch family was right in one way. "It's a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way". This is today, this is what we have. And after all it doesn't take much to start dreaming again. It'll be just like in the movies – we'll pretend to be someone else, and redraw everything from scratch. We have to. Lynch's passing, right here, right now, means we have to take of the training wheels and dare to take up the mantle ourselves. So goodbye, David. You gave us alien instruments for a scary and awesome future that only requires us to go beyond the wall of sleep, to find the strength and the weakness needed for something wholly new. And the robins will come back, at one point.
I am Ebaa Al Douma from Sudan , and we are currently facing a humanita… Ebaa Aldouma needs your support for Support Al Afya's Road to Recove
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Al-Afia was involved in a traffic accident that severely damaged her foot, leaving her with painful fractures and deformities. The treatment she has received so far has not succeeded in improving her condition. Her foot gas stopped growing completely and now Al-Afia requires specialized care and rehabilitation. Al-Afia is only 13 years old and she risks losing her foot if her family cannot afford to travel outside of Sudan to get her the care she needs.
Please support Al-Afia's family in their evacuation and seeking treatment for her. Your contribution and shares will help bring them closer to their goal.
david lynch understood on a fundamental level how abusive and exploitative the world is to those with the least power, particularly women and children. he created an entire lifetime's worth of cinematically and narratively groundbreaking work trying to grapple with that hostility and abuse, trying to reconcile the evil that exists in the hearts of everyday men with the goodness he saw there as well. he made survivors of unspeakable trauma feel seen and known in a way that few artists ever have and ever will, and never once shied away from the truth he knew and believed: that we are all innocent, that what has been done to you is not who you are, and even in times of abject despair, there are people who love you, who will not forget you or stop trying to save or defend or avenge you. i don't want that to go without notice. many people are mourning him for different reasons, and i agree, he was one of the greatest and most imaginative artists to ever be given free reign to paint on a cinematic canvas. but first and foremost, david lynch was an artist of enormous empathy, and i think those of us who saw ourselves in his work because of the empathy it afforded us are grieving particularly hard today.
Making this a separate post: It's super super important that we keep our activist work focussed on Palestine after the ceasefire. On the food aid, on the prisoner releases, on the reconstruction of essential services and the reconstruction as a whole, on the free travel of journalists and researchers to document the genocide, on the human rights and land rights of Palestinians, on the new political conditions, on BSD and on continued pressure on Israel and it's collaborators, on the West Bank, and more.
From Naomi Klein's Doppelganger about 2009:
We met Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist, who told me, “We had more hope during the attacks; at least then we believed things would change.” Now, she said, outside attention had moved on and Gazans once again felt abandoned by the world. The idea that there was more hope when they were under active air assault still haunts me.
We can not abandon Palestine. This time has to be different.
A while back I reached out to Tumblr user @yourlocalsanitizedoctoling to thank her for her kind words regarding my piece about NIN's The Fragile. In her bio I read that she refers to herself as Noctourniquet, which was actually a bit of a conversation starter for us. Noctourniquet might be my favourite Mars Volta release; not the best – that would be Frances the Mute, of course – but the one that most resonates with my personal sensitivity. So that specific name took me all the way back to when I first listened to the record, sometime around December 2013. I don't exactly ever remember this time of year feeling especially magical or unique to me (and, for what it's worth, I suspect that my sister only really likes Christmas music more so than she does just about everything else about it), but I do remember how relevant this exact climate and weather were for my enjoyment of this record that I'd bought on a whim, as a massive fan of the first three Volta records, almost as if to prove all those professional reviewers wrong. I still maintain that they are wrong, and I still cherish the record to this day – way more so than their most recent outings, anyway, but also way more so than The Bedlam in Goliath, which is a story for another time. So I guess this was a sign to finally say my piece and own it, for real.
Dear Tumblr user Noctorniquet, this one goes out for us, specifically.
So if you're familiar with the average Mars Volta record (if you're not, here's a little something) you might be feeling a bit confused right now. As usual, I'm not an inside guy, I bring nothing to the table – no scoop or profound insight or private information concerning the making of this album – but I have been listening to this record for more than ten years at this point and I feel quite strongly about it. For starters: TMV fans almost always make a point of underlining just how groundbreaking, daring, eclectic, et cetera et cetera et cetera the band was/is. And I mean, sure, I would be hardpressed not to agree with that, but part of the reason why I'm inclined to give them credit for this is the existence of Octahedron and, yes, Noctourniquet. The other part is the existence of De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute, more or less specifically: Amputechture is good and it tries a number of cool bits here and there but it's, you know, a very codified Mars Volta album for the time it came out at, and The Bedlam in Goliath is -- God, okay, let's take a deep breath and get this out of the way.
See, ideally this'd be a whole different post unto itself, a post that has more to do with the nature of music criticism and music fans than it does with Noctourniquet as an album. Look, it's simple: The Bedlam in Goliath is nowhere near as good as Noctourniquet or, fuck it!, even Octahedron, because it is not a good album by just about any metric. The long and short of it is: you know that meme that's like, this is what [insert band here] sounds like to people who hate them? Yeah, that's the entirety of The Bedlam in Goliath to me. It's overlong, overplayed, overcomplicated, its only direction is off the nearest fucking cliff, and I don't give a shit about any stories about ghosts and wiped hard drives and everything: how this is rated higher than Amputechture (or any of the releases after it) simply escapes me. I will say I'm sorry for the personal injuries sustained by the band, because I am a functioning fucking human being, but I'm sorry y'all: this is a bad album that displays no class at all. Except Ilyena, which is an honest-to-God good song, despite Thomas Pridgen's best attempts to deface it with sulphuric acid at every chance he gets to cram a fucking drum fill in.
Man, that's a load off my chest. DMs are open to death threats, by the way. Now back to an actual interesting record.
So the consensus about Noctourniquet seems to be that it's a record that displays the signs of a lack of internal cohesion, different visions for the project colliding and not merging properly, underbaked songs with uneven structures and glaringly lacking songwriting that manages to feel somewhat placeholder. I will go out on a limb and say this: all of this is true, actually, but this is specifically why the record should be cherished. Like, be fucking for real here: are we surprised that the band we all praise for their experimentation actually went out of their way to experiment with their sound? Worse than that: are we mad that they did, because this experimentation includes raising the synths' levels on the final mix? It's not like they completely abandoned guitars, or the occasional classic-Volta number, as per the song I just linked before this paragraph. There's just a whole bunch of stuff going on here (at least until track 8, but I'm getting ahead of myself). And the idea of future punk itself – it's not exactly new at all, one might argue that Noctourniquet is basically just synthpunk with extra steps, but aren't the extra steps kind of the point here? What truly makes Frances the Mute different from Brain Salad Surgery, Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Lateralus, Fear of a Blank Planet or even Script for a Jester's Tear, if not the extra steps?
One funny thing that I figured was worth including, since this entire post is basically turning into a journal entry. A friend of mine a while back posted an Instagram story with the song Nuclear Seasons. Wrong as I might be, I don't exactly expect The Mars Volta and Charli xcx to have much fanbase overlap, so in case you're not familiar it's one of the very earliest singles that Charli released as a signed artist (for obvious reasons, I'm not getting into the early mixtapes here, thank you for your cooperation). It's a whole bunch of Eighties clichés slapping you in the dick, ostensibly, but she does do one thing in the pre-chorus that just fucked me up hearing it for the first time. You'll hear it when you listen, I'm sure: there's at least two separate instances where Cedric Bixler-Zavala wrote vocal lines with that exact same sense of melody over Noctourniquet – the title track, for instance. This is to no one's detriment, but it does display very clearly just how zeitgeist-y the Mars Volta were being with this particular release. Some might potentially argue that it could be a net negative: after all, it's not like any of their other record felt particularly era-appropriate, if you ignore the smashing success of bands like Porcupine Tree, Muse and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead at the exact same time in the exact same circles, which – after typing it and re-reading it black-on-white – sure sounds like a really hard thing to ignore, now doesn't it? I'd still argue TMV is the superior band (Source Tags and Codes notwithstanding, maybe), if only by virtue of them releasing a record like Noctourniquet at what one could argue was their most broken. Not even a year after this dropped, Bosnian Rainbows looked like they were the next thing, then Antemasque for like thirty seconds flat – before everyone realized that one song sorta sucked – and then relative radio silence for a while. We were, essentially, left wondering. At the Drive-In reunited and made a couple more records, then disbanded again, then The Mars Volta reunited, released the same exact record twice and I didn't like it either time. It was a victory lap that clearly displayed the band has learned nothing of what Noctourniquet truly had to offer.
Deantoni Parks has an absolutely inorganic approach to groove and drumming that completely altered the way Volta songs were written. It made them more alien, harder to quantify and yet at the same time tighter, more clinical, laser-focused. The Mars Volta can write a radio song, they've proven it time and time again, which is why they just did not really do it for this one. Even The Malkin Jewel – lead fucking single for this thing, mind you – starts out sounding like it's coming for your carotid with a bread knife, wearing clown shoes. It's this impossible song that makes no fucking sense and sounds outright goofy on multiple occasions, and then it coalesces and has that big ass ending that we should all love so much in an ideal world. What went wrong here? Absolutely fucking nothing. It sounds like that intentionally, and it's that intentionality that I cannot help but respect. On Imago, the band starts off with this delicate emo-ass acoustic guitar arpeggio and then proceeds to absolutely mangle the bridge with shimmering synth arps, and the percussion gets smothered in slapback delay that turns it almost annoying and the track might be one of my highlights, specifically because of this. Even when the band goes medieval on the listener and tries a couple of the old tricks, the results sounds ice-cold and mechanical, and god do I love this fucking record. See next exhibit.
Granted, the record does lose a bit of steam in the second half. In Absentia, yet another banger, unfortunately just sort of inexplicably ends there, just like that, almost as if it was willingly cut by the band around the seven-minute mark so as to not turn it into "your usual Mars Volta thing"; and the record itself ends on Zed and Two Naughts (pretty good track, taken in itself), which basically just cuts the whole thing off with no particular qualms or time for reflection. I will say the track sequencing could be improved a bit, with some cuts here and there: Trinkets Pale of Moon, for instance, could have made a fun B-side, but as a whole ass track on the finished record? Eh. But then, just as you're looking the other way, the band hits you between the eyes with Vedamalady. I really don't know what to say about this anymore.
Does this not prove my point? Why is there so much beauty in what is, ostensibly, considered a "minor release" by just about anyone I've ever talked to, apart from this one stranger on Tumblr? And why is the beauty so apparent in spite (or perhaps because) of the unfinished, brutalist, stark naked nature of a record that actively got Cedric and Omar to argue, so much so that they had to call it quits for a while? No surprises that there was potential here, seeing as Omar immediately recruited a keyboard guy (Nicci Kasper) and this exact same drummer to make a new band, Bosnian Rainbows, that feels like a direct evolution/iteration on his exact sound. It is also a band that I love to death, and we sorta deserved a second album honestly, but that's a story for a different time. Point being: Noctourniquet sounds like a band falling apart, it is ostensibly unfinished, has way too many ideas and it never quite focuses on one or the other, its identity crisis is clear from the first FM bell arp all the way to the sudden full band stop at the end. And yet it holds so much potential to make it burst at the seams, and this potential feels so untapped, raw – alive, ultimately.
Hello, It's Momen Al Madhoun, writing from the most miserable area in the whole world, I am deeply thankful to all of you. Your support means the world to my family
🍉🍉🍉 I urgently plead you to keep sharing our campaign with your friends, family, and acquaintances
15 months have passed as if it were 15 years, and suffering increasing day after day 😔
Our health is decaying, we have NO IMMUNITY to fight diseases. No healthy food to feed our worn cells. Finding a quiet, clean place for us to get some rest is IMPOSSIBLE! I'm in urgent need of serious financial support so that I can take action and save my family! Our faces speak the misery we're going through! my children can't bear the ruthlessness of war life… pain and cold does not allow either of them to sleep 💔
I found in drawing a way to relieve stress and describe what we are experiencing, but even this i was deprived of, due to the difficulty of obtaining good internet and electricity for a sufficient time
If you are interested in art, you can check I my blog I and find my artworks, i hope you will share them and support me to continue fighting and trying
Every share and donation brings us one step closer to saving my family's lives. Your support, no matter how small, holds the power to rescue my loved ones from grave danger
There are no words can describe how many times we have been displaced
The situation we're living now is really hard to imagine
Where do we Go?
Imagine the vastness of this universe, we cannot escape to a safe place far from the war
🍉🍉🍉 We rely on your donations to have a shelter and provide basic daily necesseties. We need your contributions and support with us, no matter how small it may be for you, but it makes a difference for my family 🙏🏻
Please, Support us with 5$, 10$, or any donation you can make and it will be really appreciated 🙏🏻
🌟 Our campaign is vetted by 🇵🇸 @/gazavetters List at #291
My name is Mahmoud, and today I am writing about my family
I’m husband and father of two children we evacuated at the beginning of the war. but my family is still suffering inside Gaza
My family was a beautiful, cheerful family that loved life and they love each other.
We have children are make fun and they the source of happiness for home
Until one day, the sounds of explosions overtook them. Days passed, and these days were very difficult for everyone in the family. Suddenly, my father fell ill, and it was determined that he was suffering with cancer, and needed surgery outside the Gaza Strip. But, because of the situation, he was unable to leave Gaza for treatment — eventually, due to lack of medical care and after suffering with his symptoms, he died. Five days after my father death, his children (my brothers- and sisters) were injured after their home was targeted. My brother suffered a double amputation of his feet and one hand, and his other siblings were injured as well, including a severe back injury.
https://gofund.me/363ae8ca
My family suffers under these difficult situation and they have been displaced several times in more than one place.
The money raised will go towards evacuation fees for my family of 16 members : 8 adults and 8 children. I hope everyone will help my family, and help them receive the urgent medical care they need.
